It's comforting to know that, deep into the 2000s, there is still someone trying to dig a final nugget of gold from the old swapping-bodies plot device. Freaky Friday will simply never die. Never!

In this installment, it's, well, a boy girl thing. The swappers are high school seniors: Dim jock Woody (Kevin Zegers) and Yale-destined brainiac Nell (Samaire Armstrong), who've lived next door to each other all their lives and, as this type of movie dictates, now hate each other. A class field trip and an Aztec idol get the switcheroo done (the mechanics of the switch are, of course, inconsequential), but with Woody's brain in Nell's body and vice versa, how will she dazzle the regents during her final Yale interview, and how will Woody impress the talent scouts at the Homecoming football game?

If a truly bad movie -- like, say, Gigli -- deserves to be bashed, then a miserable, wretched, wholly unredeemable movie like King's Ransom deserves to be bashed, burned, and have its ashes scattered over Hollywood. Think of this gesture as a memorial to all the luckless filmgoers who will lose 95 minutes of their lives watching this steaming pile of dreck.

In case you need convincing, here's the setup. Malcolm King (Anthony Anderson) is a tycoon who's on the verge of selling his company for $25 million. (Apparently sales have been brisk for the company's bestselling product, "Boneagra," an erectile dysfunction medicine whose ads feature the tagline "Straight Up.") The problem is, Malcolm is in the middle of an acrimonious divorce, and his wife is determined to take him for everything he's worth. So he hatches a plan to stage his own kidnapping, demand an extravagant ransom from himself, and thereby shield his wealth from his wife. (How exactly this is going to work after the ransom is paid is never actually explained.)

There is a key to good'n'stupid lowbrow comedy that few lowbrow moviemakers understand, and it is this: If you have a thin but serviceable premise upon which to build cheap, vulgar, tasteless, but side-splitting dumb gags, don't slap together some insipid story clogged with clichés to prop it up -- just run with what you've got.

Don't turn your movie into Adam Sandler or Rob Schneider fodder, full of insulting attempts to make audiences genuinely feel for your imbecile heroes and wishy-washy life lessons for your stock characters to learn in the last act. Don't be an "American Pie" and backpedal on your vulgarity at the last minute with a hypocritical-apology "happy" ending.

Instead, be proudly, shamelessly, flippantly stupid, like "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle," in which two recent-grad, odd-couple roommates don't discover anything about themselves, they never see any "bigger picture," and they don't grow up at all. They just get stoned out of their gourds on a Friday night, develop the munchies for those famous square hamburgers from the titular eastern-U.S. fast food joint, and spend the rest of the picture having preposterous misadventures while driving all over New Jersey hunting for the nearest franchise location.